Cloud and Edge provider Gcore has launched an AI Cloud cluster in Newport, Wales.
This is Gcore’s third such deployment, having established an AI Cloud point of presence (PoP) in the Netherlands and Luxembourg.
The cluster has been built with Graphcore Intelligence Processing Units (IPUs), a processor designed for compute parallelism and large memory bandwidth making them useful for machine learning and AI applications.
The Gcore AI cluster is made up of Graphcore Bow-Pods, IPU-Pods, and Bow-vPods. During performance testing, a Bow Pod16 was able to train EfficientNET-B4 in less than 14 hours, while the latest GPU technology took 70.5 hours. There was also a 10x higher performance in processing Dynamic Temporal Graph Networks. The overall performance capability of these AI clusters has not been shared.
Seva Vayner, director of Edge cloud stream at Gcore, said: “The opening of Gcore’s AI Cloud cluster in Newport, in partnership with Graphcore, is an important step towards building one of the first European AI infrastructures. This move will enable businesses of all sizes to integrate innovations and easily access cutting-edge AI technology.”
While only the third such AI Cloud cluster, Gcore has PoPs in over 140 regions and more than 20 cloud locations. The company was founded in 2014, first launching its CDN and hosting services in 2016.
Several cloud companies either already have or are in the process of developing AI offerings, including Australia's Firmus, AWS, Oracle, and Lamda Labs which has raised $44 million to build its own AI cloud. All of those listed will be GPU-based AI solutions.
